Laura Jackson, founder of Januhairy, wants to bring the topic of body hair to the table for the month of January. Most women are brought up believing the only way to be a woman is to be hairless, and shaved from top to bottom - but is this necessarily good for everyone? What about women with PCOS, or those who fight back to reclaim their natural state? Laura Jackson, Founder of Januhairy   Laura is a drama student from Warwickshire - and had to play a part that required a women to showcase her body hair. Despite feeling uncomfortable she started to embrace her body and for the first time ques ..read more

You want my short answer? Scroll to the bottom. In for the long haul? Strap in, my probably-thin-or-average-sized readers, this might be a bumpy ride.  I recently started going back to the gym after a hiatus of a cool two years. It’s been effing scary. And painful. And in many ways, not as rewarding as I thought it would be. You see, this is my first time regularly exercising without the goal of weight loss dangled in front of me. The first time in my adult life where exercise has become the achievement in and of itself. And, although I haven’t had the adrenaline rush of being so hungry I pas ..read more

For better or for worse, summer is here again and fat people everywhere are feeling the heat to become beach body ready or, worse, cover themselves from head to toe in the sweltering heat. And yet, I still love summer. It feels like a challenge to give a massive middle finger to the fat-phobes. But, this love has only come with a growing in age and confidence.  I remember my mad summer before university, you know the one where you just have a blow out in your hometown because it won’t matter in September? Yeah. That one. I was just shy of my eighteenth birthday, swanning around in size-12 biki ..read more

Once again for all you gals in the back. SEX DOES NOT EQUAL PENETRATION. A sentence I have struggled with for most of my adult life, but finally as Pelvic Pain Awareness comes to a close, I am opening up about this very intimate subject to remind many women and people with uteruses out there that painful penetration is very common and something that many of us have experienced. I have always struggled with pelvic pain and this has made sexual intercourse hard for me, pardon the pun. My vagina is a sensitive soul who is always pissed off from dealing with pain so the last thing she often wants ..read more

Being talked over isn’t just bloody annoying. It’s probably one of the most pervasive acts of disrespect that one can experience in the workplace. It’s frustrating, demeaning and often goes completely unchallenged. So where does it come from? How does it manifest? And what can we do? Look, sometimes we get a bit over excited and can’t wait to get our thoughts across in earnest, so we interrupt someone. That’s cool - just apologise and move on. Maybe you’ve been stuck in a conversation where the other person is just getting it so wrong that you want to stop them in their tracks, so you interr ..read more

As a multi-hyphenate artist, I have spent much of my life contending with the illusion of a single-path life. In order to live as many lives as possible, I even decided the best way to ensure my happiness would be to become an actor. It didn’t take me long to find out that due to my ample body I was likely only going to get given one type of role, woman-who-doesn’t-look-the-way-the-industry-expects-women-to-look-and-is-therfore-a-joke. Despite my best efforts to go after a career in acting with everything I had, there were so many more things I wanted to do other than play a disgruntled woman ..read more

NEON MOON'S WOMEN WEDNESDAY We love how women are changing the world and making an impact to their home countries that we're talking all things awesome and new every Wednesday! INDIA (gaystarnews.com) A group of trans women has realized its dream and will open their own hotel in Kerala , India.The women planned to open the hotel called Hotel Ruchimudra in the state capital of Kochi in south east India. Aditi Achuth, Saya Mathew, Preethi Alexander, Pranav, Ragaranjini and Meenakshi received US$14,320 in local government funding to set up the hotel. The six women decided to start their own bus ..read more

I was at a gig not so long ago when a man I didn’t know moved to push past me, placing his hands carefully, but deliberately on my waist. ‘Sorry Darling.’ It is a common, everyday occurrence. It is something that happens all of the time. In bars, pubs, clubs and pretty much everywhere else, women are frequently referred to with terms that sit within this lexical realm. It’s benign, right? It’s nothing. Except, this time, for whatever reason, I decided it wasn’t. It may have been a momentary delusion, it may have been the gin, but this time I spoke back. ‘Don’t Call Me Darling.’ I’m pretty ..read more

You’ve probably heard the following statistic that on average, men apply for a job when they meet only 60% of the qualifications, but women apply only if they meet 100% of them.We also know that women are more likely to feel like imposters in their roles, and get paid less than men for doing the same job. So the odds are stacked against us, and we have to work twice as hard to prove we are as good at our jobs; and three times harder if you are a woman of colour. We become less and less in number as we rise up through the ranks, and the politics becomes harder and harder to manage. The notion o ..read more

I could use this space to write about the various types of sexual violence that I have experienced throughout my life, including ‘shocking’ details that in reality are - depending on your own experience - too mundane, too experienced, too relatable or too alien to truly shock. There is of course nothing wrong, and many things very right, about sharing one’s own experience if it is what the author wants for any number of reasons, from catharsis to activism. But I want to contribute to a discussion on a related but often overlooked conversation and instead of reliving some of my most painful exp ..read more